No-frills accommodation

Room without a view

Tiny additions to London’s hotel market

LONDON is renowned for its grand hotels. It is also notorious for the dinginess of some of its less opulent ones. But the lower end of the market is growing and churning. Although budget hotels account for only 16% of rooms in Britain, their capacity has roughly doubled in the past decade and is growing faster than any other part of the sector. The latest craze in no-frills accommodation is for rooms without a view—or even a window.

Capsule hotels were pioneered in Japan in the 1980s. Guests slotted themselves into small, horizontal enclosures like bees into honeycomb, with space only for a bed and a tiny television. London already has its own take on these pods: in 2007 two “Yotels” opened at Heathrow and Gatwick, the capital's busiest airports, with 78 “cabins” for hire by the hour at any time of day or night (the minimum booking is for four hours). Another 25 rooms will open at Heathrow this year.

The airport capsules are frillier than Tokyo's: there is a pull-out table and compact bathroom alongside the low-ceilinged bed. But they are stuck in a niche, serving people in transit. Japan's city-centre capsules, by contrast, serve a local market with repeat customers.

The bigger test of Britain's taste for windowless pods will come with a new project starting construction this year at the Trocadero, a Victorian building in Piccadilly Circus that was most recently host to an amusement arcade. Slap in the centre of the West End, it will have 600 identical rooms, each ten square metres, including a bathroom. “Once you take the window out you can just pack them in,” says Michael Hughes of Criterion Capital, which manages the site. The hotel is due to open in 2014.

The niche looks promising. Budget hotels in London had an occupation rate of 84% in 2010, better than their grander equivalents in the capital and the 69% occupancy in the rest of England, according to Miles Quest of the British Hospitality Association (BHA). Yet Britain still has proportionately fewer low-cost hotels than many other countries; budget brands make up a quarter of the French market, for example, and a third of the American one, reckons the BHA.

Many of the capital's existing hotels are cramped and basic, with windows that look onto ventilator shafts or grubby side streets rather than the capital's tourist glories. “They are basically sleep factories with very little else,” says Mr Quest. And downsizing is in vogue. But a room with no window at all? That might prove a hard cell.